Deadlines are slipping, stress is piling up, and you can’t quite pinpoint the cause. Sound familiar? What if you tackled workplace challenges the same way you’d handle a coding challenge?
As IT people, we’re constantly challenged by the pace of our work industry, which indirectly brings to the table topics such as innovation, creativity, social engineering, adaptation, and many others.
A life without challenges, for many, can be ideal! Unfortunately, we don’t live in such a wonderland. We either adapt or get left behind and replaced by someone who does. That’s why many workers, when faced with these sorts of challenges, compromise their resolution, as they often lack the proper skills to address and overcome them.
In this article, I’ll present some signs that might indicate your current approach isn’t working. We’ll then go through a few common blueprints to understand a given challenge, so we can better prepare ourselves for building a plan that will boost our confidence and help get the work done!
Signs you need to change approaches
Throughout our careers, our lack of success might manifest itself in different ways. Sometimes, we don’t even realize it until it’s too late, so that’s why we practice pinpointing these signs.
Some of them include:
Constantly failing deadlines. When we begin to constantly fail deadlines, we also might try to externally place the blame. For instance, we might blame the company for a lack of work organization or planning. It can be hard to understand and accept that we might be the problem.
Stress anticipation. Even before our work gets assigned to us, we might already be nervous or stressed about it. Especially if we’re counting on getting out of our comfort zone, which is a source of stress that can lead to sadness and anxiety throughout the project.
Difficulty in explaining ourselves. We might, oftentimes, struggle with expressing ourselves, for instance, when trying to explain our work or solutions to others. This could translate as a lack of consciousness or understanding of the core issue we’re trying to solve.
Lack of work segregating. By not properly detailing our tasks and not breaking complicated actions into smaller, more manageable ones, we’re leaving a lot of room for unpleasant surprises and setting ourselves up to fail.
Understanding the workplace challenges
Most of the signs mentioned above are examples of the difficulties you face when going through challenges. To begin solving them, we first need to understand the common ground between them → A problem ready to be solved!
Not fully understanding the core problem, as well as its implications, side effects, and details, is a recipe for disaster.
By experience, trying to understand the issue while implementing a potential solution will most certainly leave critical gaps open. You’ll be constantly making up the lost ground, and in the end, it will feel like a never-ending snowball effect.
If by any chance, you see yourself facing a bigger challenge, such as organizing and planning a product, it’s your lucky day! We’ve prepared this article just for you!
In the next section, we’ll dig deeper into how we can better understand our challenges and be fearless while facing them!
Building your plan while facing workplace challenges
My many years of experience allowed me to come up with a proper blueprint that will help you in your future endeavors. Here are a few points for you to consider:
1. Write down what you know about the problem. Writing down our perceptions and understandings allows us to connect the dots and make sense of our thoughts. Sometimes, not only writing but also creating visual representations (e.g., diagrams) also helps accelerate the process. Try creating a more generic one at first, and then start adding more details.
2. Flag the uncertainty. It’s no shame to highlight our lack of knowledge! We must fearlessly hunt for answers and raise any possible concerns about the unknown. While analyzing your challenge, write down every question you might have. Some will get answered during the process, however, others will remain unanswered. Those are the ones we should keep an eye on, as any uncertainty might impact our work.
3. Confirm your reasoning. Sometimes, our understanding might be compromised due to prior experiences. Try getting a second opinion, as new perspectives might be just what you need to move forward.
4. Segregate work into smaller tasks. Once we’ve got a clear picture of the challenge, you should define specific actions. From past projects, I’ve noticed people tend to outline too many generic action points, which consequently results in generic solutions that won’t necessarily help solve the issue at hand. Reuse the perceptions and understandings you’ve written, as well as your visual representations, and add them to the task you created. This will enforce context awareness whenever taking over a specific task. Highlight which specific problem you’re trying to solve with this split task.
5. Keep challenging your understanding and solutions. Going through the smaller tasks, helps us automatically mature our knowledge. It’s important to revise our previous understandings and reasonings and check if those are still in line with the goal. Sometimes we realize that we were too naive in the early stages. It’s totally normal! What matters is that we come to this realization and can address it accordingly.
6. Be realistic with your peers. Sometimes, our peers think it’s possible to get the job done even though they’ve asked us to build a rocketship in 3 days. In these situations, it’s up to us to be transparent about timing and expectations. In some cases, it won’t be possible to estimate the exact timing to address a particular challenge. That’s why it’s important to divide your work into smaller tasks so that you can share them with your peers.
Stick to the plan
When applying this type of blueprint to your workplace challenges, be sure to add personal touches to make it work for you. Don’t push yourself to do whatever others do, push yourself to be unique and create your own value. Remember that investing in yourself is a great step to fully being happy at work.
I’ve been applying most of these tips on a daily basis while being constantly confronted with new challenges. I can guarantee you for certain that being consistent with the process will help you solve issues that once seemed impossible!
If these tips still aren’t working for you, maybe it’s time for a change in scenery. Feel free to check out KWAN’s career page! Maybe your next opportunity is only one click away.
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Article written by Rafael Martins, and originally published at https://kwan.com/blog/navigating-workplace-challenges-recognize-strategize-and-overcome/ on October 4, 2024.
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